Categories

Authors

Jul 22 A Coffee and Some Practice Required Friday

“We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are.” ~Bill Watterson

It can be ridiculously easy to wish time away, can it not? One can be longing for moments not yet here or for those now behind, wishing for something new or something familiar, missing the proverbial ‘here and now’. And in my bid to not miss that ‘here and now’, to be present in the, well, present, I found myself asking God to help me not wish away the days until Jeff and I began our vacation this week, to not wish away the vacation, to simply not wish away today.

But sometimes a today can be hard. It can be mundane, boring even. It can lack a certain something, a sparkle, a sense of having travelled in comparison to things behind or things before. And, more often, my today seems very beige in comparison to someone else’s multi-coloured today.

Yes, it would seem the unspoken part of my prayer to God was, “But please, also, may every today be super-exciting. No dips or quiet work/working out of things. All zip and fireworks, no plodding or pruning.” You know, like God doesn’t know what I meant and like He didn’t know what I needed—what I need. Because right now, I’m finding the work on a dream or two to be very “every day”, to be quiet and (sometimes, in some aspects) hard, and definitely not all that fancy. It’s a bit slow as I figure things out, see how actual timeframes compare to wished-for ones. The sort of “behind the scenes” stuff that I’m sure more than one of us at one time or another would not mind being able to skip right on over.

So these somewhat “meh” today sort of days are, I realize deep down, needed and not at all uncommon. And, I’m thinking, there is the opportunity still to find some peace, some contentment, some beauty even in these times. Because patience can’t be cultivated if one never has to wait for something to come to fruition, right? Right—it’s right. I know it to be right and true. Just on some days, I need to remember to pick up that practice, to grow that discipline of a hopeful expectancy even in the midst of seeming drudgery.

How about you? How do you travel through times of waiting?

And wherever you find yourself on this today, I hope it’s a good day be it a Friday or otherwise.